Natural selection is what happens if there is no special breeding goal.
Please, please show me the law that says so.
I live in a rural village of about 2,000 inhabitants, and I have 30/6 mbit/sec DSL at around 30 €/month. In fact I guess that most "cable companies" are running DSL to your home and then send the TV signals within the DSL. I know that most phone companies do. If you order a T1 or E1 with them, you get a DSL modem with a T1/E1 port.
So the results are disappointing in a way, as the most boring of all alternative explanations seems to be true.
Yes, the autonomous cars will have bugs, and there will be situations where they just crash in a literal sense. But so do humans, and they do it fairly often. An autonomous car will not be drunk driving, and it will be not getting an heart attack at 65 mph, and it will not be distracted by that phone call or the children on the backseat getting into an infight.
And yes, owning a car will become some hobby. It's not quaint not to have a car even now. A friend of mine made a point of not owning one because he always rented one if the need arised. Thus he always had a clean, well maintained car, better than most of us car owners. If autonomous cars become the norm, renting a car if you need one will be even more convenient, because you don't need to go to the rental car park anymore, you just wait until it arrives at your front door.
He crtainly acted far better than the writing in some episodes, but nonetheless despite the writing he was still able to carry the role.
I am not quite sure about that. There have been spoofs of ST:TNG, where the makers dubbed the episodes with new lines, and some of them actually changed the character of a role completely. In German, there is the "Sinnlos im Weltraum" (Meaningless/Clueless in Space) series of spoofs, where the same scenes in which Patrick Stewards appears as a sincere, deep thinker with the original lines becomes an aggressive alcoholic - just by changing the lines. (For reference: Schwarzer Kaffee, only suitable for people with a profound knowledge of the German language.)
Instead, Mathematics and Engineering were the same until about the end of the 18th century, and then began to split because of the huge body of knowledge which made specialisation a necessity. But the greatest mathematicians of the 18th century were engineers and mechanics at the same time. Most of the french mathematicians of the time were soldiers studying such topics like artillery trajectories and the construction of fortifications. Isaac Newton build most of his instruments himself, including the lenses for his optical experiments. And it was the observation of the polishing of lenses that got him to the theory of the corpuscular nature of Light.
Grandpa probably could have been entitled to his own generation's money[...]
Actually no. Money is only worth what you can buy for. The work, the good or the service Grandpa wants to pay for has to be done right now for today's prices. And while people working today also get today's payment, Grandpa has no negotation lever on today's pricing. He earned his money in former times at former prices, and now he is retired. If the older generation which doesn't work anymore has too much money, we the working generation will (free market to the win!) just increase prices until the purchasing power of the older generation fits again the amount of work we want to spend on them. If there is too much money on the market, we always can have an inflation until purchasing power and goods creation are in balance again. Working people can deal with it thanks to increasing wages in an inflation. Retired people can't. Their retirement funds compete against the retirement funds of all the other retired people, but the share of goods and services they compete on is defined by the people still working.
Interests, payouts for 401k, house prices and all those money sources non-working people may have access to are only possible because people today are creating the surplus value which can be paid out as interests, as profits on shares or be spend on ever increasing house prices. Every retirement scheme where one stops working and still has access to goods and services is in a way a Ponzi scheme because someone else is creating the actual value the retired one is using up.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.